


leaving home, coming home

by mockturtletale



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: First Time, Locker Room, M/M, Music, aural association
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 10:35:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3689049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Objectivity seems like a faraway, fanciful kind of concept when Taylor Hall is next to you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	leaving home, coming home

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: (630): We fucked twice, I went to the bathroom to freshen up, and came back to him playing "Your Body is A Wonderland" on his guitar naked in my bed.
> 
> To the general theme: five times Taylor Hall fucks with the wiring in Ryan Nugent-Hopkins' head so thoroughly and completely that his spectacular form makes Ryan want to burst out in song, and the one time Taylor goes ahead and beats him to it. 
> 
> This challenge was the best idea anyone has ever had and I'm so glad that they did. Y'all are truly out there in the world, doing it, doing the lord's work, and for that I thank and bless you. 
> 
> See the end notes for a list of songs mentioned herein. Title is a big obnoxious clue to the second last one vaguely hinted at.

From day one it’s there, and once it is, it’s never not. 

Sometimes it’s a tangible thing, and sometimes it’s the how and why of a beautiful goal. Sometimes it’s missed calls at 4:13am, and more than sometimes it’s loud and getting louder in how they touch, the times when they look at one another and more telling still: don’t. 

Taylor is by his side, three neverending millimeters of space between their pinkies, and Ryan’s skin hums in the distance they work so ceaselessly to allude to. 

“You aren’t riding on this wave alone,” the voices in Ryan’s headphones assure him, lulling lilts that wash over him in waves, and Ryan listens, and Ryan knows. 

 

____

 

It won’t be until much, much later that Ryan even finds out what the song was. 

Honestly, it’s pretty indistinguishable from every other shitty but popular r’n’b song he’s forced to endure that night, because Edmonton isn’t exactly famed for its nightlife and no one’s here for the playlist or ambiance anyway. 

This one song, though. It kind of sticks out; an earmarked moment in a sheaf of seconds that pile up into loud, sweaty minutes, long and blurring hours. 

Taylor slouches down into a lovely sinuous lean next to Ryan at the bar and suddenly the bass in whatever’s playing hits Ryan a little harder, settles somewhere somehow lower along his back, the reverberations thrumming up through his heels and then disappearing completely when Taylor puts a casual hand on Ryan’s hip, curves his hot, _lovely_ body around Ryan’s side to shout an order across the bar. 

Ryan hasn’t really truly accurately heard a word that’s been said to him since he got here, but he feels the ‘hey’ Taylor grins at him like the syllable is built in brick. Taylor says it low in Ryan’s ear, says it like it’s part of a sentence rather than the entirety of it, and it’s a long time before he disappears back into the writhing mass of bodies that alternately swallows up and spits out their teammates and friends. It’s more than a long time before the ghost of the pad of his thumb pressed to the bare skin above Ryan’s jeans goes with him. 

It’s titled ‘Win Win’, which Ryan will forever find funny. It’s by someone called B.Smyth, and every time Ryan will hear it, it will make his pulse speed, make his jaw clench hard around the sensory memory of something too big to put words to. 

 

_____

 

Force has never really been a focus of Ryan’s game. 

He’s not small, not in the ways that count in this league, and he doesn’t let himself get pushed around, but he’s also never found himself in the kind of situation that makes him want to leap fists first, so if you asked him, he wouldn’t single out anger or frustration as any of the things that motivate him on the ice or in his life. 

Ryan tends to be a thinker. He researches, he plots, he plans, and then he goes and he does. 

Acting on impulse has never struck him as a good idea, is all, not even when he was a kid, younger and dumber than he is now and probably even slower to act, if that’s possible. 

‘Edge of Seventeen’ shouldn’t, as such, bear any kind of nostalgic meaning for Ryan, and yet. 

Taylor is slowest to get dressed again after practice. He’s the first or second or third person to arrive, catching Ryan up in the parking lot or appearing at his elbow as Ryan jogs up the stairs, falling down onto the couch next to him in the player’s lounge, kicking Ryan in the back of the knees as they file into the locker room because he has always, since the very beginning, insisted on pulling Ryan’s pigtails every chance he gets, working to make it count in ways that are always, always the good kind of hurt. 

Ryan really struggles to think of a time when he’s been in the presence of his team and _not_ had Taylor within reach, seeming to be everywhere all at once, ever-present, front and center and jostling to get there, fighting tooth and nail to keep his spot. 

Hours of reflection shed no light whatsoever on whether this impression is of Ryan’s own making, specific and personal, or community-wide and objectively true. 

Objectivity seems like a faraway, fanciful kind of concept when Taylor Hall is next to you, the heat of him making it harder to breathe than the hot huff of steam in the showers. 

Taylor grins up at Ryan from under his eyelashes and shakes his wet hair out of his face and Ryan had more close friends at seventeen than he does currently, but he feels distinctly, keenly alone in a way that he hasn’t since he was a teenager. 

The click wheel on Roy’s ancient and battered ipod classic clacks audibly over Stevie’s fierce lament and Ryan knows well enough to bet on the fact that Anton is about to change the soundtrack to something super electro, super European, and hipster enough to probably not even have been written yet. 

‘Amen,’ Ryan thinks in farewell to Stevie’s rough crooning, wondering at how it is that every single time his eyes meet Taylor’s it still feels like the very first, the most important. 

‘Good god,’ Ryan thinks in alarm, something closer maybe to benediction, when Taylor drops their eye contact and then goes on to drop his towel. 

 

____

 

Jordan is really particular about his coffee, and people who are seriously talented at pulling shots of espresso also tend to be serious about obscure music, it seems like to Ryan. 

At least, that’s the closest thing to a chain of sound logic that Ryan can cobble together to explain why he, Taylor and Jordan are sitting in a deserted coffee shop on the fringe of downtown Dallas, listening to a song that’s very explicitly, very descriptively about sex. Ryan has heard the word ‘pussy’ more times in the last sixty seconds than he has in the preceding six years, and Ryan has played organized sports since he was three; having been raised in locker rooms has learned every wrong thing he ever had to unlearn about sex on benches and in huddles.

Ryan might be blushing. The barista might be reaching to change the track. Taylor is definitely outright laughing at Ryan. Jordan hasn’t noticed any of this, so deeply enthralled is he by whatever caffeinated magic lies waiting to be slurped up out of his mug, eyes closed and hands clasped as if in prayer. 

“You’re so green you must still need watering,” Taylor says, delighted either at the situation or what he perceives to be his own wit, and Ryan gives him his best withering stare. 

They bicker as Jordan communes with the good bean gods, and the subject matter of their soundtrack might change, but the subject matter of their conversation does not. 

“So green you need _watering_ ,” Taylor insists on reiterating, even after Ryan has extensively illustrated this to not be the case, going so far as to make Taylor blush and fidget with his anecdotes, his lengthy recaps, his easily offered up tidbits to the contrary clearly falling on deaf ears, though Taylor does eventually refuse to make eye contact with him. 

Ryan is feeling bold, fueled in that moment by the brazen nonchalance of Azealia Banks as he later learns when he googles the lyrics to add the song to Taylor’s spotify queue half to fuck with him and half because he really wants to fuck him, and so Ryan shifts in his seat until he can knock his knee against Taylor’s under the table, sitting far enough forward that his leg is maybe technically pushed between Taylor’s. 

“Is that an offer?” he asks, waiting patiently for an answer though his heartbeat is galloping behind his lungs, racing so hard he can feel his pulse beat in his teeth. 

Taylor doesn’t ever actually deliver a verbal response, but the look he gives Ryan instead says more than enough. 

Jordan chooses that moment to finally surface, making noises about leaving and asking if anyone else wants to grab another coffee to go, but Ryan can’t tear his eyes away from Taylor’s, can’t think about anything except stripping Taylor of his stupid, useless clothes and tearing into him instead. 

Taylor makes some kind of sound, something long and low in his throat, and he might lick at his own lips, but Ryan is still struggling and ultimately failing to pay attention to anything that isn’t the hold Taylor’s gaze has on him, the palm it makes Ryan feel like a heavy, welcome promise on the back of his neck. 

“Cool, meet you out front,” Jordan says, ever unaware of this push and pull Ryan and Taylor have been caught up in and tripping over for months now, for years maybe if you look close enough. Ryan’s breath is still caught between his back teeth and the lump high in his throat, might have been locked up right there since Taylor Hall took his hand and said his name and with nothing more than that made Ryan _his_ in a way that no one can see or put a finger on or ignore at all for even a second, so loud is it, so sure is Ryan that this was inevitable purely because that’s exactly what he has wanted it to be. 

“I’m sure he can find his own way back to the hotel,” Ryan lightly observes as they hover by the front door, staring at each other’s shoes with their cheeks still blush-hot, their hands deep in their pockets and much less than a socially acceptable span of space observed between them. 

Ryan doesn’t know why now, but he also doesn’t care enough about those kinds of details to take the time to ask. 

Taylor takes off without a word, and Ryan follows without needing to be told twice. 

 

____ 

 

Taylor takes his clothes off like a song by The Weeknd; like every song by The Weeknd maybe, because he does so surely; movement smoothed over by confidence but paused and brittle and punctuated with meaning. Taylor strips in stops and fits and starts because he can, and because it makes his grin turn sharp and pleased to see Ryan’s hands tremble and hear him, feel him shake. 

 

____

 

When Taylor puts his hands on Ryan in places he has never touched him before, like when he pushes his fingers up under Ryan’s tshirt until the fabric bunches at his knuckles and obeys his tactile command up and up and up, there is white noise in Ryan’s ears and only a vast, blackly veined expanse behind his eyelids. 

 

____

 

“Yes,” Ryan says, when what it sounds like in his head is pleading instead. 

“Please,” Taylor tells him, between pauses for loud breaths, “Deeper. Put … please … get your tongue - oh god deeper,” and Ryan’s head is swimming, he is underwater with his tongue deep at home in the clutch of Taylor’s ass, and Taylor’s body quivers for him like the strings Ryan hears, violins singing in his ears when Taylor clenches around him like he doesn’t want him to ever go. 

 

____

 

Ryan is alone, when it finally becomes quiet in his head. 

He dragged himself away from Taylor to wash up, managing it eventually and only then by assuring himself that Taylor will still be there when he gets back, and he is, after Ryan has freshened up, when he has as quickly as he possibly could cleaned himself up as much as he can bear to and stared at himself in the mirror for the longest time, wondering if he’s alone in his head at last, at last, because he’s the furthest he’s been from alone in forever. 

Taylor is still there, naked in the bed where Ryan just fucked him for the first and then second time. 

He has dragged Ryan’s guitar over out of the corner it was propped up in, and he’s slowly, sorta rustily plucking at the strings. 

“ _this is bound to be a while,_ ” he hums at the precise moment that Ryan steps out of the bathroom and starts to make his way back to him, and Ryan smiles, though Taylor can’t see, and drums his still-damp fingers in time against his thigh. 

 

____  
____  
____

**Author's Note:**

> Tracks referenced in order: 
> 
> \- Tempest by Lucius. 
> 
> \- Win Win by B. Smyth, Future. 
> 
> \- Edge of Seventeen by Queen Stevie Nicks. 
> 
> \- P - U - S - S - Y by Azealia Banks. 
> 
> \- The Weeknd's entire discography, because why pick favorites when you don't have to and incidentally also can't. 
> 
> \- Your Body Is A Wonderland by John Mayer.


End file.
